Reflecting diseconomies of scale in providing public goods and services, recurrent spending in small states typically represents a large share of GDP. For some small states, this limits the fiscal space available for growth-promoting capital spending. Small states generally face greater revenue...

Reflecting diseconomies of scale in providing public goods and services, recurrent spending in small states typically represents a large share of GDP. For some small states, this limits the fiscal space available for growth-promoting capital spending. Small states generally face greater revenue...

This policy note presents an assessment of the EU budgetary package for 2021-2027, including the European Union Recovery Instrument 'Next Generation EU' (EURI-NGEU), with an introduction to the EU decision-making process and the state of play of the relevant legislation as well as an annexed...

This article describes the changes that have taken place in the work of the Budget Office of the central government as a consequence of the transition from the traditional budget process, often referred to as “incremental budgeting”, to top-down budgeting. This transition has taken place in...

Does fiscal consolidation lead to social unrest? Using cross-country evidence for the period 1919 to 2008, we examine the extent to which societies become unstable after budget cuts. We find a positive correlation between fiscal retrenchment and instability. Expenditure cuts are particularly...

Wagner’s Law is the first model of public spending in the history of public finance. The aim of this study is to assess its empirical evidence in Italy for the period 1960-2008 at a disaggregated level, using a time series approach. After a brief introduction, a survey of the economic...

This paper investigates the interaction between fiscal policy transmission and fiscal sustainability, captured through the concept of fiscal space. In order to measure the evolution of fiscal space over time we propose four indicators, drawing from different concepts available in the literature....

The United States has a huge long-term fiscal gap, perhaps with a present value of around $74 trillion. By contrast, the explicit national debt of the U.S. is only around $6 trillion. The U.S. may thus be unable to continue meeting its current spending commitments without eventually enacting...

Globalization and growth-maximizing governments may cause countries to converge towards a similar composition of government expenditures. These convergent forces may be even more intensive in the case of EU Member States engaged in the European integration process. The results obtained, through...

The proposed balanced budget amendment is actually a spending limitation amendment. It would limit federal spending to 18 percent of GDP. This article argues that using GDP to calculate the maximum amount of spending is grossly inappropriate, especially for a constitutional amendment, because...